Sunday, December 02, 2012

Right-wing pundits scramble to rewrite history after the election – Jonathan Chait examines the case of John Podhoretz

Jonathan Chait, in his best satirical style, picks Commentary editor John Podhoretz to serve as an especially striking and illuminating example. (Unlike most of the rest of us, Chait reads all of these people closely and carefully all the time. Better him than me!) Some highlights:

The first few weeks after a losing presidential election are an awkward period for the most devoted ideological polemicist. Months of optimistic spin about your candidate must be cast aside for an entirely different sort of spin — where before the candidate was a budding juggernaut boldly carrying the party banner onward to victory, now we can see in hindsight that he was a hapless loser unable to articulate our side’s clearly winning vision. Transitioning from one line to another can often take months of careful tip-toeing. Commentary editor John Podhoretz offers up a magisterial postelection essay, “The Way Forward,” that instead simply takes the full plunge all at once.

The postelection Podhoretz argues that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” He owes it all to the brilliance of his campaign strategists — “a peerless political instrument, a virtual machine.” Obama’s assault on Romney business career may have “been the smartest and most effective political campaign of our lifetime.”

This may be a jarring message for Podhoretz’s devoted readers, whom Podhoretz spent months assuring that Obama was flailing about and headed for near-certain defeat. Obama was politically incompetent [....] On top of this he was weigheddown by a terrible economy. Romney was in much better condition than the polls showed, Obama in deep, deep trouble. [....]

The preelection Podhoretz believed that Romney was offering just the right level of detail to the voters: [....] The postelection Podhoretz now sees that Romney’s singular error was his failure to offer enough specifics [....]

Etc. So what conclusion would Podhoretz like us to draw now? The Republican defeat in 2012 "in no way whatsoever" represented a
repudiation of right-wing Republican policies and ideology. Not at
all. The obvious lesson is that Romney should have pushed an extremist hard-right message more clearly, explicitly, and skillfully. He couldn't do that successfully because, deep down, he's not really a principled, "severely conservative" right-wing extremist. Here's how Podhoretz puts it in his essay:

Seen in this light, the notion that the right is dying is ludicrous. Romney called himself “severely conservative,” and that may be true of him personally, but it certainly was never true of him politically. [....] When he needed to convince people not only that he had it in him to be presidential but that he had distinct ideas of what he would do once he became president, he failed. Conservatism could have saved him. He did not understand it, and he rejected it.

How can Romney’s loss invalidate the right when he was not a candidate of the right?

And here's how Chait sums it up:

The astonishing turnabout in the evaluation of Obama’s campaign, from delusional nincompoops to the most terrifyingly efficient campaign apparatus in history, helps Podhoretz reach his desired conclusion, that Obama’s victory owed nothing at all to his policy platform. [....] The postelection Podhoretz asserts that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” In no way whatsoever. Onward to victory in 2016, comrades!

Indeed, the 2016 campaign has already begun. Meanwhile, before we're totally caught up in that, read the whole piece (below).

The first few weeks after a losing presidential election are an awkward period for the most devoted ideological polemicist. Months of optimistic spin about your candidate must be cast aside for an entirely different sort of spin — where before the candidate was a budding juggernaut boldly carrying the party banner onward to victory, now we can see in hindsight that he was a hapless loser unable to articulate our side’s clearly winning vision. Transitioning from one line to another can often take months of careful tip-toeing. Commentary editor John Podhoretz offers up a magisterial postelection essay, “The Way Forward,” that instead simply takes the full plunge all at once.

The postelection Podhoretz argues that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” He owes it all to the brilliance of his campaign strategists — “a peerless political instrument, a virtual machine.” Obama’s assault on Romney business career may have “been the smartest and most effective political campaign of our lifetime.”

This may be a jarring message for Podhoretz’s devoted readers, whom Podhoretz spent months assuring that Obama was flailing about and headed for near-certain defeat. Obama was politically incompetent (“what we’ve seen so far is a reminder that the skills required to mount an insurgent campaign with a charismatic unknown aren’t those needed to mount a re-election effort featuring an incumbent with a problematic record"). On top of this he was weigheddown by a terrible economy. Romney was in much better condition than the polls showed, Obama in deep, deep trouble. “Without a stark turnaround in his fortunes,” observed Podhoretz, he might lose [North Carolina] by 10 points this November.”

Romney was the candidate running a brilliant campaign. To the preelection Podhoretz, it was obvious that the ads attacking Romney’s biography would fail. (“Obama team must know that they can’t prevail solely with a negative assault on Mitt Romney.”) Obama’s campaign was in the midst of a “smoke screen of self-delusion,” pathetically unaware of their own coming demise:

Because they don’t only sell the snake oil, they drink it themselves. They buy their own propaganda; they believe the hype.

The astonishing turnabout in the evaluation of Obama’s campaign, from delusional nincompoops to the most terrifyingly efficient campaign apparatus in history, helps Podhoretz reach his desired conclusion, that Obama’s victory owed nothing at all to his policy platform. Obama’s campaign, he tells us now, was “bereft of ideas” and offered “no second-term governing agenda whatsoever.”

The preelection Podhoretz believed that Romney was offering just the right level of detail to the voters:

... the “Romney isn’t being substantive enough” crowd is wrong if its members think the strategy of staying relatively vague is a losing one. Successful politicians have to allow less ideological voters some room to project their own best hope for the future onto the person they’re thinking of voting for.

The postelection Podhoretz now sees that Romney’s singular error was his failure to offer enough specifics:

The contentlessness of the Romney campaign was a vacuity of the center-right …Thus did the flight from content create a fatal problem for Romney. He may have thought his lack of specificity would lend him more appeal, but in the end, it made him less appealing because he offered nothing but words.

The preelection Podhoretz was perfectly willing to credit any potential Obama victory, however unlikely, to his policy agenda:

if he loses on Nov. 6, he will lose for the same reason he would have won — because of his very real, very substantial, and very consequential achievements.

The postelection Podhoretz asserts that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” In no way whatsoever. Onward to victory in 2016, comrades!

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research, He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)